Audiobooks by Terry Tempest Williams

Finding Voice For Authentic Conversation

Terry takes us on a whirlwind tour of what it means to give voice to our own authenticity. It requires deep listening and fertile silences. She encourages us to speak “Mother Tongue” — speaking from the belly rather than the mind. She laments that in Western culture “the language of economics has power, the language of the law has power, the language of science has power. But an intelligence of the heart, an emotional intelligence, or a poetic sensibility, or even a sensibility that comes from the side, from a different angle, from a different point of view, asks us to form a different kind of shape of conversation.” In this delightfully warm and thoughtful program you’ll be dazzled by the mystery of Terry’s dying mother’s request for her to read her journals, but not until after her death. Terry found 3 shelves of journals only to discover all of them were blank. Puzzle along with Terry as she takes us from the Red Rock Wildlands of Utah to the Plains of Kenya in a far-reaching dialogue about finding one’s authentic voice. (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Essence of Erosion and Evolution

Here we stare down our present situation without flinching but with radical hope as Williams reminds us that love and beauty is felt in chaos and heartbreak. Healing is going beyond anger; It’s a process of eroding and evolving at once. We must let go of our certainty to come back into a place of communion and communication with each other and with the earth.

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Erosion: Essays of Undoing

This program is read by the author. Fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams is one of our most impassioned defenders of public lands. A naturalist, fervent activist, and stirring writer, she has spoken to us and for us in books like The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks and Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. In these new essays, Williams explores the concept of erosion: of the land, of the self, of belief, of fear. She wrangles with the paradox of desert lands and the truth of erosion: What is weathered, worn, and whittled away through wind, water, and time is as powerful as what remains. Our undoing is also our becoming. She looks at the current state of American politics: the dire social and environmental implications of recent choices to gut Bears Ears National Monument, sacred lands to Native People of the American Southwest, and undermine the Endangered Species Act. She testifies that climate change is not an abstraction, citing the drought outside her door and at times, within herself. Images of extraction and contamination haunt her: "oil rigs lighting up the horizon; trucks hauling nuclear waste on dirt roads now crisscrossing the desert like an exposed nervous system." But beautiful moments of relief and refuge, solace and spirituality come-in her conversations with Navajo elders, art, and, always, in the land itself. She asks, urgently: "Is Earth not enough? Can the desert be a prayer?"

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Terry Tempest Williams (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns with The Hour of Land, a literary celebration of our national parks, what they mean to us, and what we mean to them. Through twelve carefully chosen parks, from Yellowstone in Wyoming to Acadia in Maine to Big Bend in Texas, Tempest Williams creates a series of lyrical portraits that illuminate the unique grandeur of each place while delving into what it means to shape a landscape with its own evolutionary history into something of our own making. Part memoir, part natural history, and part social critique, The Hour of Land is a meditation and manifesto on why wild lands matter to the soul of America. Our national parks stand at the intersection of humanity and wildness, and there's no one better than Tempest Williams to guide us there.

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Terry Williams (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Heart of the Wild

Williams tells the story of her initiation by the living land when she was 7 years old. While taking a school trip she ended up alone, in the dark, in Mount Timpanogos Cave. For a brief but powerful moment she felt the beating heart of the mountain. She says, “For the rest of my life I’ve been trying to retrieve that sacred space I felt inside that mountain alone. I have been searching for that moment when you’re part of something so old, so deep, so true.” Take a tour with Williams and find the relevance of our national parks in the 21st century and how these public commons might bring us back home to a united state of humility. It’s Terry Tempest Williams’ hope that we learn what it is to offer our reverence and respect to the closest thing we have to sacred lands. Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan stated that our American national parks are our best idea. Williams goes on to say, “And I would argue that they are our evolving idea; it’s never one story but many stories that are rooted in these American landscapes.” She reminds us that as we visit these public lands we can tune into a stillness that is outside of all the noise, distractions, and chaos in our everyday life. “They are places where we find a united state of humility . . . We are in this deeply fractured and divided country. I think if we could listen more to each other we would find a compassion that would surprise us.” (hosted by Justine Willis Toms)

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Finding Hope and Beauty In The Dark Places

Williams speaks out for some of the most disavowed individuals on the planet: prairie dogs, who are threatened with extinction, and Rwandan refugees. She deftly draws meaning out of moments of devastation with inspiring stories of rodents who pray at sunrise and sunset and a mother who, after losing her child to the ravages of war, creates a mosaic sunflower out of the rubble.

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bioneers Series 1-07: Wise Women of the Earth: It's All Intelligent

Katsi Cook, Kirstin Wilson, Marta Benevides, Nina Simons, Starhawk, Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Bioneers Series 2-02: Gaian Wonders of the Co-Evolutionary Dance

Who needs TV when the waves at the beach are phosphorescing, the fungal internet is pulsing, and the laws of physics are being broken all around us by...water? These Bioneers celebrate the wonders of nature they encounter in their work for the Earth and explore, among other things, 'the ocean eye' and variations on a nematode worm.

Jennifer Greene, Jeremy Narby, Phd, Paul Stamets, Peter Warshall, Phd, Steven Foster, Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Michael Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

Wild Heart: The Politics Of Place

Environmental politics becomes a matter of sensual passion rather than political correctness in this rich, colorful mosaic of thoughts on wildness, landscape, animals, and humans. It sparkles with gems of insight mined from Williams' own profound sense of belonging in nature and includes the voice of the late Edward Abbey, maverick environmentalist and friend of hers.

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Meaning of Refuge

Williams connects two catastrophic events: living downwind of atomic nuclear testing in the deserts of Utah and the record breaking flooding of the Great Salt Lake. These events have deeply affected her sense of the need for refuge. She poetically conveys to us her personal perspectives on grief, love, and the spirituality of nature, lake and desert.

Terry Tempest Williams (Author), Justine Willis Toms (Narrator)

Audiobook